Chapter Seventeen
“In miracles, Luisa, water turns to claret! In miracles, the Virgin Mary pops in for tea! In miracles, I clinch a deal without everyone wanting something for bloody nothing!”
William barrels unsteadily through the good-natured crowds that mill idly around a small shopping street quite close to his hotel.
The throng, happily oblivious to the time-clash phenomenon taking place in their midst, are on their leisurely post-tapas, pre-dinner way to do some late-night, classy designer or tourist-tat shopping.
And catch the evening’s next procession, which is visibly and noisily imminent.
William just wants to lie down.
Preferably with his mouth wide open, under an optic of upturned Scotch.
Nothing makes sense any more and he’s bloody sure no one round here is going to help him, not even the local archbishop.
“Moving in mysterious ways” is no succour to him right now and the drumming he can discern coming closer is as nothing compared to the drumming in what he used comfortably to call his brain.
Pilgrims with rosaries and agnostics with cameras receive equally short shrift, as he bangs elbows, bags and the occasional well-placed knee against anyone daring to stand in his way.
Children and old people included. An equal-opportunity bruiser, he’s not even being British and saying “sorry” all the time. They don’t apologise in Bedlam.
He proclaims his bewilderment over his shoulder to his similarly shell-shocked wife, who this time is struggling to keep up through the swirl.
“In miracles, I make a profit during this sodding downturn,” William continues relentlessly, “and we don’t have to wonder where our next bloody euro is coming from! So don’t talk to me about miracles!”
She wasn’t, actually.
Luisa was thinking that at least the evening’s lunacy had kept him away from the constant checking of his email.
Which – when she considers it – is a miracle in itself.
But as soon as she catches up with him, he turns round and shouts into her face.
This is, of course, in order to be fully heard above the chatter but also because he wants to shout into her face.
“I’m a bloody marketing consultant from Govan, Luisa. We don’t DO miracles!”
Even as he yells this out, some inner commentator tells him that these particular words have most probably never before been bellowed within the ancient walls of one of the great cathedral cities in Europe, on the most important week in the Catholic calendar.
And now, of course, the procession arrives.
Right on schedule, he imagines; no manana for this lot.
There’s no way he or anyone else can move around and beyond it.
More Nazarene hordes, more parishioners with a cross to bear, another vast band of brothers from the hermandades.
And, rising up above her ravishingly floral and candlelit nest, precious metals glinting, Mary herself.
The newly bereaved and exquisitely carved mother, gazing down with such heartbreaking love and grace on all her children.
From a tiny balcony just above them, an elderly man, surrounded by his family, suddenly begins to sing.
Even William, who thinks he can never be surprised again, is stopped by this. It isn’t that the voice is so very beautiful, at least not to him, but somehow the depth of untarnished emotion sends it close to heaven.
A small woman, dressed entirely in black, whom he discovers standing peacefully beside him, tells him “saeta”.
He has no idea what this means but he guesses she is putting a name to what he is hearing.
It feels spontaneous, this “saeta”, as if the impenetrable words the man chants so fervently come directly from his heart not a hymn sheet.
It is Luisa, long-lapsed Catholic, who breaks the spell. “So – what? We ignore this? How, William? How we are to ignore this ‘not-miracle’?”
“I don’t know, Luisa! Don’t ask me – I just don’t—” Disconcerted, he looks up at the singing man, but his own words speak of more earthly matters. “Did you see how she looked?”
Luisa knows that he is talking about Lu. Formerly Luisa Montero. Lu Sutherland for the past four blissful days. As Luisa was. As Luisa never will be again. “Full of life,” she ponders. “Full of dreams.”
“I’ll give them a wake-up call in the morning.”
Luisa grabs him with an urgency that takes him unawares. “No. You do nothing with them! You hear me, William? Nothing! … SUDDENLY I AM SCREWING NAZIS IN BUENOS AIRES?”
William adds this to his list of things rarely said at Easter.
As, evidently, do those around him who understand English.
Unfortunately, this would appear to be almost everyone.
A young Australian couple, who have their cameras at the ready for the procession, swiftly snap off a couple of Sutherlands, just in case anyone should ask them if they met a still-attractive, middle-aged, Argentinian Nazi-screwer on their travels.
The bystanders appear to be awaiting William’s response with some interest. To their everlasting disappointment, his phone rings.
They don’t pick up Luisa’s long-suffering sigh and of course William has heard that particular sound so often that it ceases to register.
It probably wouldn’t resonate even if she shinnied up onto that balcony and turned it into a song.
“Sutherland,” he answers, although he can barely hear anything over the drums and the irreverent, yet paradoxically deeply respectful, Spanish crowd, most of whom appear to William to have brought their entire families along: ‘from crib to crone’, as he might have phrased it, were he still writing ad copy (which, somewhat to his own regret, he hasn’t done for quite some time).
Mary is now staring indulgently down at him, so he turns away.
“Oh, hello, Senor Barb—Cristobal. Good of you to… yes, I can talk. Just. …Oh? Well, thank you. Yes. Er – sí. I’m sure that would be grand.” He looks to Luisa warily, as if to check out whether it would indeed be grand. “…No, no, she’d be delighted. Really.”
William watches his wife as she stares up at the majestic float, which appears to sail past them into the blue-black, sultry night on a bed of flame. And he wonders, for a moment, why she is gently stroking her no longer unlined yet quite unadorned throat.